The “Integration” That Was Actually Denise

A client told me proudly that their inventory system and their accounting software were “integrated.” I asked how it worked. Turned out the integration was Denise, every Friday afternoon, exporting a file from one system and manually importing it into the other.

It ran like clockwork for almost two years — until Denise had a family emergency and was out for a week. Nobody else knew the export needed a small formatting fix before the other system would accept it. The numbers quietly drifted for eleven days before anyone noticed the two systems didn’t agree anymore.

Nothing about Denise’s Friday routine was wrong. It’s just that calling it an “integration” made it sound automatic and durable, when really it was one person’s habit standing in for a connection that was never actually built.

If the person quietly holding two of your systems together took a week off with no notice, would you even know it was them keeping things in sync?